Position to Win. Strategic Moves for Market Success

Caroline Herrick

Head of Brand & Creative

Ponder this... Who is actually positioning your brand?

For tech CEO's and Founders looking to grow their business in competitive markets, the big question you need to ask is – who is positioning your brand. Is it you, or are you leaving it up to your customers?

Positioning is the thing that provides context to your market. So chances are, if you’re not deliberately and strategically positioning your company and your products in the minds of your customers, then you’re leaving it up to them to do it. More often than not, this means they’ll make a ton of (often incorrect) assumptions of what features your product has, who it’s for, what it costs, and who you compete with.

Consider this example… I’m a company that creates wearable health technology. If I call my product a ‘fitness tracker’, customers assume it’s a tool for monitoring physical activities like steps taken, calories burned, and heart rate. They’ll compare it to brands like Fitbit or Garmin. They’d expect a user-friendly interface, long battery life, durability and basic health metrics. However, if I position the device as a ‘comprehensive health monitoring system’, it changes customer expectations. They now anticipate advanced features such as continuous health monitoring, medical-grade data accuracy, integration with healthcare providers, and alerts for health anomalies. Alternative products would be Apple Health or Medtronic.

So you see, while both devices are wearable, portable, and designed for health and wellness, how they are positioned helps consumers make the right assumptions and comparisons around things like features, functionality, alternatives and price.

In a nutshell, correct positioning ensures your market clearly understands your value from the get-go and ensures you’re putting your best foot forward so to speak.

Make it a business decision, not a marketing one.

Developing the right positioning strategy means having the right people in the room – the CEO, and product, sales and marketing leaders. Unlike brand positioning that focuses on how you want to be perceived, strategic positioning is about making informed, strategic moves to define the market where you are most likely to win right now, and clearly demonstrating your value to this market in light of their alternatives.

Traditional brand positioning is about messaging, whereas strategic positioning is about aligning business objectives with market demand and competitive realities.

It’s about making smart choices based on insight to position your company for success today – driving growth, supporting sales, strengthening your brand, and building a sustainable competitive advantage for the future.

Start with insight.

The key to your positioning strategy lies in understanding what truly matters to your ‘best’ customers - those customers who care the most about what you do.

Find out what problems are they trying to solve and the different ways they feel they can solve these problems. What do they value the most when it comes to solving these problems? How do they perceive your ability to solve them? Now map how your capabilities align with these.

Be crystal clear on your value.

Once you understand who/what you actually compete with (too often in the B2B tech space it's inertia), and the value that you deliver that the alternatives can't, your well on your way to nailing your positioning strategy.

And implementing this strategy can make the difference between surviving and thriving in competitive markets.

But positioning isn’t a one-time effort; it’s an ongoing strategy that evolves with market dynamics and customer expectations. It’s not merely about being different; it’s about being different in a way that matters to your best customers today.

If you need help to audit your current position, define your market and ensure that you're seen as the best solution to meet your customers’ needs, then please get in touch👇